According to Lucas Searle, head of private cloud at Microsoft UK, as the cloud brings increased automation and more efficient delivery, it also shifts the IT focus away from just keeping the infrastructure going.

In addition to updating its laptop line; providing more details about its July release of the next OS X, Mountain Lion ($19.99); and unveiling the Google-goading iOS 6, set for a fall debut, Apple also tossed around some interesting – and some very, very big – numbers on Monday morning during the keynote to its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco:

Dell is previewing a new blade server implantation of its EqualLogic storage arrays that will slide into its M1000e blade enclosures and offer customers and all-blade server, storage, and switch option, while at the same time not many compromises on performance or density.

One of the world’s largest mobile chip companies, MediaTek, is focusing its R&D efforts on smartphones at the expense of its feature phone business in another clear sign that the market for budget 3G handsets in countries like China and India is about to explode.

Huawei and ZTE suffered a PR blow this week after it emerged that executives from the company had been convicted of bribery offences in Algeria and sentenced in their absence to ten years each in jail.

China has issued its latest action plan on human rights, glossing over minor issues such as online censorship and press freedom but re-affirming commitments to increase broadband penetration in the country.

EU businesses that provide applications to consumers through the Google Apps platform may require additional mechanisms to the new contract terms offered by Google - in order to legitimately transfer personal data collected from app users overseas, an expert has said.

In one of my blogs on Google Street View, I wrote that the Information Commissioner (ICO) could not serve a Monetary Penalty Notice (MPN) on Google when its software captured some personal data from household Wi-Fi systems. This assessment was based on the fact that Google published statements to the effect that only an insignificant cache of random personal data was captured and that any capture of personal data was wholly unintentional.

Blocks and Files
NAND is heading to the graveyard, getting closer and closer with every geometry shrink and every added cell bit. Any replacement NV-RAM technology will require controller software rip-and-replace, which could kill one trick pony flash array startups.

Android App of the Week
Assuming you haven’t been on another planet for the last few months you'll be aware that soccer's 2012 European Championships kicked off in Warsaw on Friday. Sixteen teams, 31 matches and, I predict, the usual post-mortem in regards to England’s woeful performance.

Buyer's Guide
Until the day when broadband is much faster, all devices have wireless internet access and sync'n'store services such as Dropbox or Google Drive are ubiquitous, memory cards will remain the most convenient general-purpose, pocketable storage.

Open ... and Shut
Just two years ago, Git barely eked out a mention in Forrester's analysis of the software configuration management (or source code management) market, despite a clear trend toward open-source SCM tools. Now Git owns 27.6 per cent of the SCM market, according to a recent Eclipse Foundation survey, with Subversion apparently in terminal decline. Git's success, long driven by its embrace of the open-source ethos of forking, is now set to hit overdrive as it has broadened its appeal beyond command-line-loving elites to Windows developers.

Who should own .web? Will the internet get a .porn address? What does Google plan to do with 50 new top-level domains? Why is ICANN putting companies through an online "archery game" that requires millisecond timing?

Webcast
The biggest challenge in getting to the next level of supercomputer performance – Exascale – is the massive amounts of electricity these systems will consume. On a smaller scale, energy consumption also inhibits HPC installations. The problem isn’t just getting enough plugs from your walls to the grid; it’s also the cost of electricity when you’re guzzling it in such massive quantities.

So farewell, then, the 17in MacBook Pro. Your demise was forecast back in April by market watcher Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI, a stockbroker, and sure enough you're no longer listed among Apple's selection of laptops.

Review
They say good things come in small packages, and at only 3.5m long Volkswagen’s new city car is certainly small. To put that into context it is 28.5cm shorter than the unloved Fox it replaces and only 53.5cm longer than the original Mini.

Blighty's one and only astronaut, Tim Peake of the European Space Agency, has just embarked on a bold mission into an environment where few human beings have ever ventured: that of the saturation diver, semi-permanently adapted to life under high pressure and able to survive only deep underwater or inside pressurised containers.

WWDC
Apple's Passbook, announced at yesterday's developer conference as part of iOS 6, is clearly a step towards NFC payments, but even in its present form it has people pretty excited, so it's a shame that it won't work with the UK's biggest e-ticket deployment.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, was distressed to find his personal belongings had been liberally distributed sans GPL - his prized laptop, wallet and passport were nicked at a conference in Argentina.

Analysis
Facebook is helping Apple to solve the biggest problem facing mobile app stores: sorting through the quagmire of mediocrity endemic in the industry. But more importantly Facebook has found a way to turn mobile punters into profit.

Hadoop Summit 2012
Hortonworks, the company created a year ago from the spinout of the Yahoo! engineering team behind the open source MapReduce method of data munching known as Hadoop, is leading its first release to market by the nose.

Cisco Live 2012
Nothing is what it appears to be in the data center any more. Servers have integrated storage and switching, routers and switches are getting servers. And virtual switches and now virtual routers are running inside of servers and blade enclosures.

Credit and debit card processor Global Payments has warned that additional confidential information on its servers may have been compromised in the hacking attack earlier this year that saw around 1.5 million credit card details snatched.